The present invention relates to an electrostatic type ink jet recording method wherein ink drops issuing from a nozzle are charged uniformly or varyingly and steered to a recording medium through a varying or uniform electric field.
In the prior art ink jet recording methods of the type described, the lengthwise and widthwise directions of a recording medium are selected as the auxiliary scanning direction Y and the main scanning direction X respectively. A print head or a recording medium is moved in the direction X while the ink drops are deflected in the direction Y so that a number of m ink drops may be placed in one column during one main scanning interval. Therefore, the recording medium is shifted to one line direction Y (auxiliary scanning), whenever the main scanning in one column is terminated. Since the charged ink drops are deflected stepwise, a predetermined number of ink drops are contiguously placed on a recording medium in the direction Y. Therefore the time interval from the time when one ink drop is placed on a recording medium to the time when an adjacent ink drop is placed is equal to the ink drop formation period Td, which is very short. As a result, before the preceding ink drop is sufficiently soaked into a recording medium, the succeeding ink drop impinges against it adjacent to the position where the preceding ink drop has been placed so that the two ink drops merge into a single, large blob instead of leaving two clear and distinct ink dots, thus degrading the printing quality. In addition, the two successive ink drops tend to bounce apart from each other, landing often at unpredictable positions, thus causing misalignments among ink dots, degrading the printing quality and contaminating the print head.